UN: 1 in 3 human trafficking victims a child, crime goes mostly unpunished

Reuters / John KolesidisRT

The number of children among human trafficking victims has increased from one in five to one in three over the last decade, according to a newly-released UN report. It also says the number of convictions for the crime is “extremely low.”

In its latest report, released on Monday, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says the child trafficking figure is particularly high in Africa and the Middle East, where it represents two-thirds of all human trafficking cases.   

The watchdog acknowledges its estimates are based on a tip-of-the-iceberg official numbers, but says the figures can still give an idea of the scale of the problem.

“Unfortunately, the report shows there is no place in the world where children, women and men are safe from human trafficking,” said UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov.

Children forcibly recruited as soldiers

Child soldiering has widely been recorded as a form of trafficking in areas of ongoing armed conflicts.

“Most of the cases are reported from countries in Africa, where the different armed groups operating in Central and West Africa have been forcibly recruiting children to use them as combatants for decades,” UNODC says.

The watchdog cites 2014 UNICEF figures that at least 6,000 children have been recruited by armed groups in the Central African Republic.

“In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission documented the recruitment of 996 children over a 20-month period in 2012-2013,” the report says. “Victims are not only Congolese, but also children from neighboring countries as these armed groups are mobile and operate across the entire Central African region.”

Child soldiering has also been documented across the Middle East and South America.

Syrians increasingly vulnerable

Armed conflicts are on broadly boosting human trafficking, with those fleeing war zones becoming easy prey for recruiters.

Syria has been singled out in the report as a vivid example.

“According to the information collected for this report, during the period 2011-2013, eight countries in the world report having detected Syrian victims, while victims from this country were very rarely detected before the beginning of the Syrian turmoil in 2011.”

One-third of traffickers are female

UNODC records an “exceptionally high” number of women convicted for human trafficking, according to Kristiina Kangaspunta, chief of the UNODC’s Global Report on Trafficking in Persons Unit.

“Given that many human trafficking investigations are based on victims’ testimonies, these low-ranking female traffickers are most likely to be identified and convicted, while the men at the top of the chain are rarely seen or known by the victims,” Kangaspunta told Reuters.

Almost 30 percent of convicted traffickers are women, the report says. For other types of crime the number of female convicts is two or three times lower.

While the majority of human trafficking victims – 53 percent – are subjected to sexual exploitation, the number of those trafficked for forced labor has been increasing over the years and currently stands at 40 percent.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has recently estimated the illicit profits of forced labor to be $150 billion a year.

‘Impunity prevails’

Earlier this month anti-slavery campaign group Walk Free estimated that nearly 36 million people across the globe were involved in some form of slavery.

The reason behind the huge number of people engaged in forced labor could be that human trafficking is a sort of crime where “impunity prevails,” according to the UNODC.

The group says 15 percent of the 128 countries covered in its report did not record a single conviction for human trafficking, while 40 percent of the countries only reported 10 or more annual convictions each.

http://rt.com/news/208523-un-report-human-trafficking/

3 thoughts on “UN: 1 in 3 human trafficking victims a child, crime goes mostly unpunished”

  1. Well I’m sure that children are easier to snatch than adults, and fetch a higher price too, so this shouldn’t surprise anyone.

    The fact that is goes “mostly unpunished” has to be because the people who buy kids for sexual pleasure are rich, or are elected officials. Everyone else hates pedophiles.

    Reply

    1. Well, if David Icke is to be believed, the elites (that is, reptilians) need children to nourish their reptilian bodies so they can remain human looking and so they do not revert back to being completely reptilian…he claims eye-witness evidence from friends of the late Princess Di…I don’t know how “reptilian” these psychos are, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they were descendents of what the Bible calls “Nephelim” (Genesis 5–“there were giants on the earth in those days (Noah), and also after that…the sons of God mated with the daughters of men…”)…and, as everyone knows, the elites must replenish elite DNA in all generations in order to keep up by marrying “commoners” that have some royalty in their lineages (Di was distantly related to Henry VIII).

      Reply

  2. like we give a f#$k what the UN has to say about it!
    I was told a story from a relative of an incident he would rather believe he was drugged than that it actually happened. lets just say his friend’s ears grew pointed and he began to speak in Latin. his girlfriend says, as she flicking the needle, here I have something especially for you J. during the course of the night, guys girlfriend sticks the needle in his penis and releases the blood in the syringe onto the ceiling and blood drips off the ceiling. next thing he knows, guys girlfriend is throwing herself at him literally as she’s making this weird sexual moaning sound. his first instinct was to protect himself and pulled out a knife. to top the night off a woman shows up who looked like a straight up witch. morning couldn’t come soon enough. that was the last time he ever spent time with this friend. this guy has had some strange encounters almost too crazy to believe. this is just one of many.
    easier for me to take what david icke says more figuratively than literal. reptilian to me means most base or predatorial part of the brain. I hope.

    Reply

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